Look at me: Read Online Free PDF Page B

entourage spiraled from the theater into the carpeted lobby. The guys were sparring, tousling, and Moose leaned down and hoisted Ellen over his shoulder—so easily, as if she were a cat, and her clogs fell off but Moose wouldn’t let her down, he ran with her through the glass doors and into the parking lot, where I heard the swells of her laughter. Someone collected the clogs and brought them to her. I watched, incredulous. To be coddled, protected that way—what must it feel like? To be at the absolute center, adored by the boy whom everyone loved, without trying. What could compete with it?
    That fall, I saw Ellen walking home from school ahead of me. She was alone, sadness closing back around her now that Moose was gone. I forced myself into a trot and caught up. “I feel so weird around you now,” I said.
    “Me, too,” she said.
    “We have to forget about that. We have to go back to how it was before.”
    “We have to!” she agreed.
    Then silence. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and we pushed terse, empty comments back and forth as I counted the minutes to my house. When finally it came into sight, I pretended my mother was waiting for me and ran ahead, leaving Ellen by herself.
    I had thought it would be hard to make new friends, but it turned out that Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we’d been empowered by our accord. Eventually we settled down with boyfriends and went to proms and even signed each other’s yearbooks— Good luck with everything! —and except in the most abstract sense, I forgot about that night.
    I did pay one last visit to Ellen’s house. This time with Moose, who graduated from Michigan and returned to Rockford to work for his father. I picked him up my senior year at a state championship hockey game, where he was watching teenage boys scramble over the ice. By then Moose’s aura of fame had shrunk; even the youngest siblings of the kids who had revered him were gone, and East High, where once he’d reigned, no longer knew of his existence. He was still living at home, and I followed him up the dark familiar stairs, past the master bedroom where his invalid mother spent her days, past Ellen’s empty room (she was a year older than I, and had already left for college) to his own attic lair: faded sports posters loosening from the walls, dusty trophies lining shelves. There was a seriousness about Moose that I hadn’t remembered. As we sank onto his bed, I noticed a series of ropes and pulleys connected to a box attached to the ceiling. I asked what they were. “Nothing,” he told me. “Some old stuff I outgrew.”
    When it was over he faded into a doze. I stared at him, the bulky shoulders, the slightly purplish cast of his eyelids; this locus of so many years of cumulative envy and mystery, idolatry and myth, now prone, snoring lightly into a pillow.
    His eyes opened. “What?” he said, groggy.
    “You,” I said.
    He looked puzzled, and raised himself onto an elbow.
    “Just … Moose,” I said, shaking my head. “Moose. Moose Metcalf. I can’t believe it.”
    He grinned, uneasy. He knew exactly what I meant. Wind filled the bedroom from his tiny window.
    “Actually, my name is Edmund,” he said.
    I was not a nostalgic person. I didn’t save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I’d thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events—so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future. Now, as I made my limping way among the tall bare trees toward Ellen Metcalf’s house, it was not with the intention of losing myself in misty-eyed recollections of my old friend, but to see the house now. To learn what it, and if possible she, had become.
    The Metcalf manse was a rambling Tudor style that has always been popular among the midwestern rich. The lawn still impressed me, wide and lush despite the